When We Were Animals(8)

Arriving at the quarry, we saw four girls already there—Adelaide Warren, Sue Foxworth, and Idabel McCarron with her little sister, Florabel, in tow. We scrambled down into the quarry, bringing tiny avalanches of white silt pebbles after us.

“Where’s Rosebush?” was the first thing Polly said as a greeting to the other girls.

“I don’t know,” said Adelaide. “Look what we found.”

We all gathered in a circle around the thing on the ground. At first I couldn’t figure out what it was—a wispy thing like smoke or frayed burlap, it moved with the breeze. Hair. It was a long skein of mousy brown girl hair.

“It was ripped out,” Sue said.

“How can you tell?”

“Look.”

She reached down, gathered its tips into a bunch, and picked it up. Dangling from the base of the lock was a scabby little flake that I quickly understood to be scalp skin.

Florabel shrieked and started running in circles.

“Shut it,” her sister said.

“Whose is it?” Polly asked.

“I don’t know,” Sue said. “Better be a local girl.”

A fierce territoriality is the by-product of uncommon local practices. Whatever happened in our town was manageable as long as it stayed in our town. We were not encouraged to socialize with people from elsewhere. We were taught to smile at them as they passed through. Every now and then some teenager from a neighboring town would get stuck here during a full moon—and the next day that outsider would usually go home goried up and trembling. That’s when trouble came down on us—authorities from other places going from door to door, kneeling down in front of us kids trying to get us to reveal something. But for the most part, people left us alone. Ours was a cursed town to outsiders.

Just then there was a sound in the trees above, and we gazed up to find Rosebush Lincoln standing next to her bike on the lip of the quarry.

“I’m here, creeps,” she said and let her bike fall to the ground. Strapped to her back was a pink teddy-bear backpack whose contents seemed heavy enough to make it an awkward process to climb down to the floor of the quarry. Once at the bottom, though, she sloughed off the pack and came over to where we stood.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the hair that Sue still held in her fingers.

“Hair.”

“Uh-huh,” Rosebush said. “I know where that came from. Mindy Kleinholt. My brother says she’s been going around all week with a new hairstyle to cover the empty spot. Happens.”

Rosebush shrugged with a casual world-weariness that made her seem thirty-three rather than fourteen.

Sometimes the thunderclouds gather overhead, and sometimes your haughty cat refuses its food, and sometimes you are partially scalped in a moonlit quarry. Such things are a matter of chance and hazard.

Rosebush, whose lack of interest in the hair made everyone forget it at once, unzipped her teddy-bear backpack to reveal what she had been struggling to carry: six tall silver cans of beer connected at the tops with plastic rings. She set the cans on the ground before us, stepped back, and presented them with an expansive gesture of her arms.

“Behold,” she said. “My brother stole it from the grocery store, and then I stole it from him.”

“It’s double stolen,” said Adelaide, crouching down in front of the beer and running her finger in a delicate circle along the top edge of one of the cans. She was fairylike, always, in her movements. “It’s still cold,” she added.

“It’s iced,” explained Rosebush. “We have to drink it before it gets skunked.”

So she passed around the cans to the other girls. I took one but found it difficult to open, so Polly opened it for me.

“Where’s one for me?” Florabel said.

“You don’t get one,” said her older sister.

“Cheers, queers,” Rosebush said, raising hers.

Everyone drank. I lifted mine in imitation of drinking, but I didn’t let much get into my mouth. Just enough to wet my lips and tongue. The taste was awful, like moldy carbonated weed milk. The other girls crinkled their noses as well.

Rosebush lectured us.

“You have to drink it fast,” she said. “Hold your nose if you need to.”

“I’m going to enjoy mine throughout the afternoon,” said Sue.

“Me too,” said Adelaide.

“Suit yourselves,” Rosebush said and shrugged.

We sat on the stones, holding our cool cans of beer. I stopped pretending to drink from the can, because nobody seemed to be paying attention to whether I was or not. Instead I put my fingers in the icy trickle of water running down out of the hills.

At one point the conversation turned to boys, and Rosebush brought up Petey Meechum.

“We nearly kissed the other day after school,” she announced.

“What’s nearly?” asked Sue.

“Nearly,” Rosebush repeated in a tone that suggested any further calls for clarification were forbidden.

“He once told me I had pretty hands,” said Adelaide, then she held them up for the benefit of any admirers.

“Anyway,” Rosebush went on, irritated, “Petey Meechum is the kind of boy who puts girls into one of two categories. You’re either a potential lover or you’re a permanent friend.”